We often get several auto generated e-mails from different social networking websites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc. For example, Twitter emails us whenever there is a follower, Facebook emails us every month for our page insights and lots more. These are sort of some useless emails which can be avoided as they just add to the email clutter in our inbox.

Thus to overcome this issue, Bin Lang and Tim Kendalli, taking inspiration from MyPermissions.org, created Notification Control, a web service that offers direct links to all email notification pages of social sites where you can click on any link and sign into that service and manage or unsubscribe them if you want.

When you will visit this web service the link of which you will find at the bottom, you will be prompted to uncheck all those services that you don’t wish to receive emails from. If you unsubscribe from all of them, you won’t get any notifications from the social sites. When for the first time I used this tool, I got to know about https://twitter.com/settings/notifications link, which was something unknown to me till now.

Once you bookmark such links, you will be able to manage all your subscriptions, whenever required. So now, visit the link given below, where you see various icons of the social networking websites. Click on the icon from which you don’t want to get any notification, signup/login for that service and uncheck all those Email notifications that you don’t want to receive. Thus this one is the best mode to reduce all your tensions.

This service will come very handy to you if you wish to clean up the app permissions which you might have provided while using social sites like Facebook. Since these apps uses your details to send you emails, Notification Control can help you clean all of them in one go.

Google drive is a cloud based service that was introduced by Google. Since its launch, it is providing phenomenal services to its users with different features like 5 Gigabytes of free online storage space so that you can synchronize all your local files and data with cloud storage so that you can access all your files online.

By installing Google drive for PC or Mac you can synchronize all your files by dragging and dropping it in the program. The application runs silently in the background and synchronizes all files and folders that are dragged into the Google Drive root folder on the system.

But most of the users must have observed that the files that are hosted on Google drive sometimes have a specific link only. These are like shortcuts that will open the file in the default browser. Like in the image above the documents that are Google Spreadsheets have a file size of 1 KB only.

The actual thing is that, when you click on these links it may take you to the connected Google account and often gives access to all other Google services as well. People may find it an easy and comfortable way as you can access all Google services of the account, including Google Mail, Webmaster Tools, Google Docs or YouTube directly.

But what if some other person is using your local system? He may also access your Google account in the same way if Google Drive is installed and running on the system. He may access your mails, documents etc. present in your Google account.

This problem however is associated with Google drive only, other service asks you to login for the first time you start the service in your browser. The only solution to this problem is that either you do not run Google Drive automatically on your system, or do not use it at all if you think that this is a security issue.

There is no other solution available to this as of now, however we will update you whenever it is.

Developers and IT administrators have, no doubt, the need the deploy some website through HTTPS using an SSL certificate. While this process is pretty straightforward for a production site, for the purposes of development and testing you may find the need to use an SSL certificate here as well.

As an alternate to purchasing and renewing a yearly certificate, you can leverage your Windows Server’s ability to generate a self signed certificate which is convenient, easy and should meet these types of needs perfectly.

Creating a Self Signed Certificate on IIS:

While there are several ways to accomplish the task of creating a self signed certificate, we will use the SelfSSL utility from Microsoft. Unfortunately, this doesn’t ship with IIS but it is freely available as part of the IIS 6.0 Resource Toolkit (link provided at the bottom of this article). Despite the name “IIS 6.0″ this utility works just fine in IIS 7.
All that is required is to extract the IIS6RT to get the selfssl.exe utility. From here you can copy it to your Windows directory or a network path/USB drive for future use on another machine (so you don’t have to download and extract the full IIS6RT).
Once you have the SelfSSL utility in place, run the following command (as the Administrator) replacing the values in <> as appropriate:selfssl /N:CN=<your.domain.com> /V:<number of valid days>
The example below produces a self signed wildcard certificate against “mydomain.com” and sets it to be valid for 9,999 days. Additionally, by answering yes to the prompt, this certificate is automatically configured to bind to port 443 inside the Default Web Site of IIS.

While at this point the certificate is ready to use, it is stored only in the personal certificate store on the server. It is a best practice to also have this certificate set in the trusted root as well.
Go to Start > Run (or Windows Key + R) and enter “mmc”. You may receive a UAC prompt, accept it and an empty Management Console will open.

In the console, go to File > Add/Remove Snap-in.

Add Certificates from the left side.

Select Computer account.

Select Local computer.

Click OK to view the Local Certificate store.

Navigate to Personal > Certificates and locate the certificate you setup using the SelfSSL utility. Right-click the certificate and select Copy.

At this point, your server should have no problems working with the self signed certificate.

Exporting the Certificate
If you are going to be accessing a site which uses the self signed SSL certificate on any client machine (i.e. any computer which is not the server), in order to avoid a potential onslaught of certificate errors and warnings the self signed certificate should be installed on each of the client machines (which we will discuss in detail below). To do this, we first need to export the respective certificate so it can be installed on the clients.
Inside of the console with the Certificate Management loaded, navigate to Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates. Locate the certificate, right-click and select All Tasks > Export.

When prompted to export the private key, select Yes. Click Next.

Leave the default selections for the file format and click Next.

Enter a password. This will be used to protect the certificate and users will not be able to import it locally without entering this password.

Enter a location to export the certificate file. It will be in PFX format.

Confirm your settings and click Finish.

The resulting PFX file is what will be installed to your client machines to tell them that your self signed certificate is from a trusted source.

Deploying to Client Machines

Once you have the created the certificate on the server side and have everything working, you may notice that when a client machine connects to the respective URL, a certificate warning is displayed. This happens because the certificate authority (your server) isn’t a trusted source for SSL certificates on the client.

You can click through the warnings and access the site, however you may get repeated notices in the form of a highlighted URL bar or repeating certificate warnings. To avoid this annoyance, you simply need to install the custom SSL security certificate on the client machine.
Depending on the browser you use, this process can vary. IE and Chrome both read from the Windows Certificate store, however Firefox has a custom method of handling security certificates.

Important Note: You should never install a security certificate from an unknown source. In practice, you should only install a certificate locally if you generated it. No legitimate website would require you to perform these steps.

Internet Explorer & Google Chrome – Installing the Certificate Locally
Note: Even though Firefox does not use the native Windows certificate store, this is still a recommended step.
Copy the certificate which was exported from the server (the PFX file) to the client machine or ensure it is available in a network path.
Open the local certificate store management on the client machine using the exact same steps as above. You will eventually end up on a screen like the one below.

On the left side, expand Certificates > Trusted Root Certification Authorities. Right click on the Certificates folder and select All Tasks > Import.

Select the certificate which was copied locally to your machine.

Enter the security password assigned when the certificate was exported from the server.

The store “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” should be prefilled as the destination. Click Next.

Review the settings and click Finish.

You should see a success message.

Refresh your view of the Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates folder and you should see the server’s self signed certificate listed in the store.

One this is done, you should be able to browse to an HTTPS site which uses these certificates and receive no warnings or prompts.

Firefox – Allowing Exceptions

Firefox handles this process a bit differently as it does not read certificate information from the Windows store. Rather than installing certificates (per-se), it allows you to define exceptions for SSL certificates on particular sites.
When you visit a site which has a certificate error, you will get a warning like the one below. The area in blue will name the respective URL you are trying to access. To create an exception to bypass this warning on the respective URL, click the Add Exception button.

In the Add Security Exception dialog, click the Confirm Security Exception to configure this exception locally.

Note that if a particular site redirects to subdomains from within itself, you may get multiple security warning prompts (with the URL being slightly different each time). Add exceptions for those URLs using the same steps as above.

Conclusion

It is worth repeating the notice above that you should never install a security certificate from an unknown source. In practice, you should only install a certificate locally if you generated it. No legitimate website would require you to perform these steps.

World Backup Day is March 31st and we decided to provide you with some useful information to make backing up your data easier. We’ve published articles about backing up various types of data and settings both offline and online.

There’s all kinds of settings on your computer to backup in addition to your personal data, such as Wi-Fi passwords, drivers, and settings for programs like web browsers, Office, and Windows Live Writer. There are also many tools available to help you keep your data and settings backed up.

With all of the online accounts we all have, it’s easy to get lazy and start using the same password for multiple websites, services, and accounts, for fear of forgetting an important password. However, this can compromise your private information.

We have published many articles about generating secure passwords, storing your passwords securely, resetting your password in your operating system, and other useful information about managing your passwords and other private information. Here is a collection of useful tips about passwords to help you keep your information and accounts secure.